10 Essential Values For Living Transformation

In my post last week, “2012: Ush­er­ing in the 100th Mon­key,” I iden­ti­fied 10 val­ues essen­tial for align­ing one’s con­scious­ness with the prin­ci­ples of trans­for­ma­tion. In that these val­ues do not con­sti­tute an exhaus­tive list, I invited read­ers to include oth­ers and I’ve even thought of a few more of my own.

In the next few weeks, I’d like to exam­ine each of these more closely so that as we nav­i­gate this year of 2012 we are ori­ent­ing our con­scious­ness and behav­ior in the direc­tion of the par­a­digm shift that is the promise and the pos­si­bil­ity of this time.

Keep­ing in mind an essen­tial prin­ci­ple that gov­erns human behav­ior — con­scious­ness aligns with itself — there needs to be a crit­i­cal mass, or a con­ver­gence of energy, thought and con­scious­ness coa­lesc­ing around a sin­gle idea or pos­si­bil­ity in order for any kind of col­lec­tive shift to occur.

Con­sider the Arab Spring or the Occupy move­ments that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Sud­denly there were masses of peo­ple in the streets protest­ing, and their num­bers mush­roomed overnight. Sud­denly an entire move­ment was born that swept the earth. In a heart­beat, it shaped and shifted the col­lec­tive con­ver­sa­tion about humanity’s response to the crises, eco­nomic and polit­i­cal, that had choked off the free­doms we con­sider essen­tial for living.

How did this move­ment take birth so quickly? Well, love it or hate it, we live in the Infor­ma­tion Age, where through the use of social media, ideas are spread around the world in an instant. And because con­scious­ness aligns with itself, when a crit­i­cal mass of con­scious­ness is aligned in any direc­tion — in this case, in the direc­tion of going to the streets — behav­ior follows.

Based on this prin­ci­ple, the job now is to cre­ate a crit­i­cal mass of con­scious­ness aligned with the prin­ci­ples of awak­en­ing and trans­for­ma­tion in order to achieve such a shift. I believe the stage is now set for this to hap­pen, though it will not have hap­pened overnight. The stage has been under con­struc­tion for over four decades, at least at the con­scious level, and for mil­len­nia prior to that.

The stage is set, the cos­tumes are ready, the props are in place, the cast has assem­bled, the audi­ence is seated, the lights are down, cell phones are silenced, the orches­tra is ready. The cur­tain is about to rise. What unfolds from here is the drama that together, we are about to co-create.

And so we come to the first prin­ci­ple of trans­for­ma­tion to sup­port the process:

Accept­ing per­sonal responsibility

So much has already been writ­ten about this sub­ject. Yet I con­tinue to be amazed at how many peo­ple still think that respon­si­bil­ity = blame. This is exactly the cul­tural def­i­n­i­tion of the con­cept that we want to transform.

One might even be tempted to won­der if malign­ing respon­si­bil­ity this way is not another tac­tic to make peo­ple think that being respon­si­ble is a bad thing and to be avoided at all costs, thus per­pet­u­at­ing the vic­tim con­scious­ness that keeps peo­ple pow­er­less. Well, let’s blow up that idea right now.

A trans­formed def­i­n­i­tion of responsibility

Respon­si­bil­ity refers to a struc­ture of inter­pre­ta­tion by which I choose to stand 100 per­cent as the cause of what hap­pens in my life — no excep­tions — includ­ing my thoughts, feel­ings, actions, inter­pre­ta­tions and result­ing events.

Respon­si­bil­ity means author­ship. It is to be aware of cre­at­ing one’s self, one’s des­tiny, life predica­ments and out­comes and, if such be the case, one’s own suffering.

Respon­si­bil­ity is not the truth, like a fact. It is a con­text from which one chooses to live. It starts with the will­ing­ness to come from a point of view that you are the cause of your own actions, no one can make you do any­thing. You are the cause of what you have and what you are.

But you might won­der: Why­choose to be 100 per­cent respon­si­ble? What’s the point? Why take on such a bur­den? Isn’t that heap­ing a lot of weight on one’s shoul­ders? Isn’t it a set up for failure?

In a trans­formed under­stand­ing of respon­si­bil­ity we learn that it is not bur­den, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt. In respon­si­bil­ity, there is no eval­u­a­tion of good or bad, right or wrong. There is sim­ply what hap­pens and the will­ing­ness to hold your­self account­able for how you respond.

Accept­ing per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity is to claim your­self as the uncon­tested author of your life. Even though much of what hap­pens in life is beyond our abil­ity to con­trol, what we do have is the abil­ity to choose how we’ll respond to what hap­pens. So if you want to have a say about who you are and what your life is for, respon­si­bil­ity is a require­ment. It is the foun­da­tional prin­ci­ple of trans­for­ma­tion. With­out it, all the rest are null and void.

Why choose to be 100 per­cent respon­si­ble? Because it is the key to access­ing your per­sonal power, free­dom, cre­ativ­ity, alive­ness and pas­sion, for starters.

You can’t be kind of, or some­what respon­si­ble. You either are or you’re not. No one else can make you be respon­si­ble, nor can you impose it on another. Respon­si­bil­ity is a gift you can only give to your­self, like a blessing.

All of us have had things hap­pen to us in ways that had us feel, either for a moment or per­haps for a life­time, that we were a vic­tim in that cir­cum­stance. Life isn’t always fair. Vic­tim events hap­pen. Air­planes crash, earth­quakes hap­pen, peo­ple rob, steal, cheat and take advan­tage. No one gets through life with­out many moments of feel­ing like what just hap­pened shouldn’t have hap­pened. Feel­ing like what just hap­pened wasn’t your fault, you didn’t deserve it, you weren’t to blame.

We all have sto­ries and bat­tle scars from the vic­tim wars we’ve waged, and we’ve gath­ered a lot of evi­dence to be right about our sto­ries. We enlist our friends in giv­ing sym­pa­thy or extra atten­tion because of what hap­pened to us. We use our vic­tim sto­ries as excuses for (fill in the blank… not get­ting on with life, not tak­ing risks, not being in a rela­tion­ship, not trust­ing, not lov­ing our­selves, etc.

At the fac­tual level, all that may be true. But in between what hap­pens to us and the sto­ries we tell our­selves about it there is a tiny gap. Maybe it’s only a mil­lisec­ond. In that gap lies the pos­si­bil­ity that we can con­sciously choose our response. And in that choice lies all the power and free­dom human beings could pos­si­bly want.

Just ask Nel­son Man­dela or Vik­tor Frankl, both of whom suf­fered years of impris­on­ment and phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal abuse at the hands of cruel regimes. Frankl was in a Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camp dur­ing WWII, Man­dela impris­oned for 26 years dur­ing the apartheid regime of South Africa. Yet upon release, each spoke about how the power of choice helped them not only sur­vive what had hap­pened, but emerge from their expe­ri­ence, not angry and embit­tered or vic­tim­ized, but empow­ered to make a dif­fer­ence by help­ing oth­ers to see within them­selves the source of their own true power.

The respon­si­bil­ity to cre­ate a world that embod­ies the prin­ci­ples of trans­for­ma­tion is ours. If we accept that respon­si­bil­ity as a gift and a bless­ing instead of a bur­den, we can be empow­ered to move freely in the direc­tion of the promise of this time. It is choice we make for our­selves to live in this way, or not. The man­tle is there to be picked up. The choice to do so or not lies within each of us.

The time of the 100th mon­key is upon us, if we say so. I invite you to declare for your­self what this year is for you and for the world. For if the Great Awak­en­ing is to occur, it will be a team sport. And it begins with tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for invit­ing your­self to be on the team. Are you in?

Tagged as: choice, Consciousness, Nelson Mandela, Philosophy, Philosophy of mind, responsibility, South Africa, transformation, Viktor Frankl